/lit/ - Literature

I've got a Birthday coming up, and my folks always send me a pile of books in the mail for it. This year, they've asked for suggestions.

I want some books on philosophy, literary theory, aesthetics, or other similarly interesting topics. Ideally obscure books

Thusfar, I have pic, Persuasion and Rhetoric by Michelstadter, The Well Wrought Urn by Brooks, and The Theater and its Double by Artaud. Any other obscure picks?

Any books like this, about the body and its relation with mind?

I can't stand the purple prose in this
Can someone explain to me why continentals write like this?

What should I keep in mind while reading pic related?

I have a problem with the relation between philosophy and literature. Stuff like pic related, and some other contemporary stuff like Nietzsche, sometimes seem like they could had been perfectly inside a novel simply working more as an aesthetic element in there than as a philosophical one, philosophical losing all its definition if this is the case.
What I'm trying to say is: where does literature end and where does philosophy start, and the other way around?
Stuff like Descartes' Metaphysical Meditations and Aristotle's Metaphysics, I see them, sometimes, like something in between prose and poetry, as some sort of architecture work, which sometimes feel more as an aesthetic project than a "philosophical" one, this last one being something that must somehow integrate as a whole all these other phenomenons. What is this, then?

>>11093092
I started reading pic related and it interests me but I don't really understand it that well because the prose is kind of dense and I didnt start with Husserl and I don't enough to do it
Will I ever make it?

What's a 21st century version of this?

and >>10454399

This will blow your mind.

>>10350231

This was truly great.

This is amazing.

What should one read before trying to read Merleau-Ponty? From what I've heard he isn't "super hard" but I still feel there's probably something one should be familiar with before reading him, and I don't mean the greeks or other obvious "philosophy essentials".

Why does nobody talk about this? It's one of the best philosophical work I've read. Mind-blowing.